5th February 2003 at 08:06 PM tacoman528 said this in Post #1
We know that an atom is composed of protons and electrons. If the protons are positive and the electrons are negative, then what keeps the electrons from crashing into the positively charged nucleus. If the nucleus is completely made of positive material, what holds it together? Wouldn't it fly apart because of the like charges. We know that gluons don't because they have never been observed or measured. How would they hold the atoms together anyway, no force is really strong enough to keep electrons away from the nucleus or to keep the nucleus together. That is, except the power of god.
This is the worst of god-of-the-gaps. It is completely antithetical to orthodox Christian theology because you have just reduced God to a material creature to keep atoms together.
Others have given you the scientific answers (although you do not accept them), below is the theological fallacy of your position. This is one of the biggest dangers of creationism: total ignorance of theology and the failure to see what their ham-handed attempts to "prove" God do to theology.
"There are profound biblical objections to such a "God-of-the-gaps," as this understanding of God's relation to the universe has come to be called. By "gap" it is meant that no member or members of the universe can be found to account for regularly occurring phenomana in nature. God is inserted in the gaps which could be occupied by members of the universe. This is theologically improper because God, as creator of the universe, is not a member of the universe. God can never properly be used in scientific accounts, which are formulated in terms of the relations between members of the universe, because that would reduce God to the status of a creature. According to a Christian conception of God as creator of a universe that is rational through and through, there are no missing relations between the members of nature. If, in our study of nature, we run into what seems to be an instance of a connection missing between members of nature, the Christian doctrine of creation implies that we should keep looking for one. ...But, according to the doctrine of creation, we are never to postulate God as the *
immediate* cause of any *
regular* [emphases in original] occurrence in nature. In time, a "God of the gaps" was seen to be bad science as well as bad theology. Science now is programamatically committed to a view of nature in which there are no gaps between members of the universe."
Diogenes Allen, Christian Belief in a Postmodern World, pp. 45-46.